Standing bow pulling was almost the death of me

Don’t know why, but I’ve been feeling a little run down lately, stressed, not up to my usual superhuman ability to grab the universe in a half-nelson, flip it sideways and slam it to the mat in a piledriver. I’ve been running through a bunch of variables, and maybe it’s the usual poop: Get more sleep, improve the diet, be sure to exercise, pay attention to how much I’ve got on my plate.

After last night’s post, I got a really nice and long letter from that early girlfriend I’d mentioned, the one who lived in San Francisco. She told me she regretted turning me on to that spooky astrologer, and advised me to pay more attention to free will and not listen to anyone who uses terms like “converse progressed Chiron sesquiquadrate North Node” to make predictions; that if I’m going to buy into that line of bullshit, then I ought to stick with the basics: conjunctions, sextiles, squares, trines, oppositions.

Good advice.

Then she goes into this “I see you’ve still got that emo rollercoaster ride of transiting Uranus conjunct natal Sun going on, so stay flexible.” I think she mentioned yoga.

I’ve been thinking a lot about yoga lately. Thinking is the operative word, because I just haven’t gotten much farther than that, even though my 56-year-old body is crying out for something to twist it back into shape. I used to do yoga for a long time, off and on, and I even went to this place in town called Yoga Loka and did Bikram-style hot yoga on a pretty regular basis a decade or so ago.

The problem was, I’m like six-foot-seven, and I have a nasty habit of toppling over when I lose my balance. And I lose my balance when the room is heated up to “kill the bedbugs” range, because I am in fact a big pussy or maybe just a hereditary cold-weather Scotsman who blanches at the mere mention of tropics. And so, I would topple around like a drunk on one leg trying to keep it together during a roadside field-sobriety test, and I would utter “Fuck!” and “Shit!” and the other yoga class people would get pissed off at me and complain to the teacher that my grunts and utterances were fucking up their yoga time.

So I didn’t get kicked out, but I got actively encouraged to learn to practice yoga all by my lonesome. Not by the teachers, who were really cool, but by some of the other students, and by my now ex-wife, who made fun of my efforts. Fuck it. I’m a spazz.

And so, it is time for me to sing “Yoga Is as Yoga Does.” Alone. C’est la vie. —Jackson Griffith